by Peter Orner
Everybody demanded an audience with Bernard.
Nadley: “Hey Bern, how about that General Grant I lent you in February?”
Bernard: “February? It was April. Aren’t I good for it, Josiah? Fifty? It was thirty-five. You charging interest? What, Shylock? My old friend? You can’t be usurious!”
And Josiah Nadley, a titanic, sedentary man, roars a laugh and bellows to the entire street, to what’s left of downtown Fall River, the old Borden Block, the vacated storefronts, the payday-loan outfits. “Do we love this guy or do we not love this guy?” Then he raises a shoe and wobbles a moment before ramming that worn-out brogan down hard on Bernard’s foot, once, twice, three times. “How could anybody not love, love, love this guy?”
Fall River Wife
It’s said that after Delmore Schwartz went bonkers, the aged wunderkind’s poems began to sag like his once-lean body. Poetry no longer paid. I mention this because an uncle of mine had a brief connection to Schwartz during those final batty years. He wasn’t my uncle. Uncle Monroe wasn’t anybody’s direct uncle. He was an uncle in the way that every man of a certain age is an uncle. Technically, he was an uncle’s brother, Uncle Horace’s. Monroe wasn’t his real name, either. He’d been born Morton. Everyone in Fall River called him Mort. At some point, in the ’50s, just as he and Horace were beginning to make it as investment bankers, Mort changed his name to Monroe. At first, people laughed. Your father arrived cargo from Danzig in 1912. Now he captained the Mayflower? Soon enough, the brothers were so rich, nobody thought Monroe’s new name was so hilarious.
James Joyce says there’s one tony relative in every family. In my mother’s, there were two. The Sarkansky brothers made good. Made very good. Eventually: outlandishly good. Turned out they were only moving money around—first piles, then hills, then small mountains. The old con: rob Peter to pay Paul and around and around and around. A happy circle until Paul stops getting paid because Peter, for whatever reason, starts sniffing around and asks one too many questions. When that happened, in the mid-’60s, Uncle Monroe shot himself, leaving Uncle Horace holding an empty bag with a fat hole in it. By then, the Sarkansky brothers were in hock to the tune of millions. Only the major investors got anything back.
Family and friends ate the losses whole.
But for that good while, nearly two and a half decades, things were flush, and the two brothers were the highest of fliers. They called themselves industrialists. What exactly was meant by this, nobody knew, but a title like that seduces. And who wouldn’t have been sweet-talked by Monroe Sarkansky? His Manhattan office address? An apartment on East Seventy-Seventh? The pied-à-terre in Nassau? (Before I was born, my parents once stayed in this pied-à-terre.) Uncle Monroe played a good tycoon. Flamboyance and conspicuous spending were part of his act. So were the fedora worn aslant and the fake English accent. My grandfather said he sounded less British than constipated. As if Mort had been stuffing all his dough up his you-know-what.
People should have known a dependable 8, 9, even sometimes 10 percent per quarter return on their investment was too good to be true. But whoever puts the kibosh on what’s too good to be true? Start making money like that, people begin to think they deserve it.
Adding to his mystique was the fact that Monroe “maintained” a wife back home in Fall River. Monroe had, long ago, left domestic life behind, but he’d never, gallant that he was, divorce his Fall River wife. Occasionally, he’d breeze into town and visit the old homestead on Locust Street before screeching back to Manhattan in his limousine. On one of these conjugal visits, a child was conceived. The ’50s were contradictory. Ike and picket fences. But if you had enough money and panache, you could get away with murder. Even Fall River couldn’t help going a little nutty over a native with a chauffeur. He was always in the paper. A throwback to the heyday when Spindle City reigned supreme as the undisputed textile capital of the planet, when, it used to be said, Fall River produced enough cloth per year to wrap around the world fifty-seven times and still have enough left over to make a suit for William Howard Taft.
For years, I never even knew Monroe’s wife’s name. But I heard things. “Brilliant” was one. “Troubled” was another. My mother once let slip that she’d been “disturbed.”
Uncle Horace was the more modest of the two brothers, less the conquering hero. He was quiet, diligent, bespectacled. And in his respectable way, Horace collected the life savings of family and friends, except, it is always noted, Irv Pincus. Irv, being a crook himself, knew a swindle when he saw one. But whoever listened to Irv Pincus? Sure, Uncle Horace had a palatial house up in the Highlands and a summer place at Mattapoisett known as the Shambles, but his role was to project sobriety and prudence. If any investor had doubts about the one brother, they could be reassured by the other, depending on their taste.
In ’64, when a couple of shell companies went under unexpectedly, the brothers found themselves without enough cash flow to pay out that quarter’s interest. The sudden announcement of losses tipped off some of the bigger fish that something stank. These investors called in their principals. The beauty of it had always been the utter simplicity. Money in, money out, easy as breathing. They didn’t make anything, sell anything, or even, the amazing thing, invest in anything. When it collapsed, it all went poof, there being nothing there in the first place. (Aside, of course, from what they’d skimmed and spent.) The story goes that at a dinner party in Montauk attended by Sammy Davis Jr., Carol Channing, and a couple of sheikhs from Arabia, Monroe excused himself, saying, “Wouldn’t it be jolly to have a look at the moon?”
He used a pearl-handled pistol.
Monroe’s corny last line brings it back to Delmore Schwartz. At the apex of his wealth, Uncle Monroe began to pursue in earnest what was, apparently, his only true passion. He loved money, who doesn’t, but more than anything else, Monroe Sarkansky longed to be a poet. A published poet. He found it no more difficult than hustling relatives. He hosted a few bohemian gatherings. He provided oceans of premium-grade hooch. The doors of the New York literary citadel flung open. One drunk writer led to another. It’s said it was the critic Anatole Broyard, knowing his old friend was hard up and possibly losing his senses, who suggested that Monroe pay Delmore Schwartz for poetry lessons. “Pay him enough and he won’t say no,” Broyard told Monroe. Or, is said to have said. This is all third- and fourthhand. And Schwartz, though he may well have hated himself for it, agreed to give poetry lessons in his Greenwich Village apartment to a grotesquely wealthy man with airy dreams. Schwartz only demanded that Monroe order his driver to park the limo around the corner. He didn’t want to see it when he looked out the window.
Now: there is no evidence, judging from the three volumes of poetry Monroe Sarkansky published in quick succession (one posthumous) with the Dial Press from 1965 through 1969, that he learned a single thing from Delmore Schwartz. At least not the Schwartz who wrote:
O Nicholas! Alas! Alas!
My grandfather coughed in your army,
Hid in a wine-stinking barrel,
For three days in Bucharest
Then left for America
To become a king himself.
Monroe would have understood the hunger to become a king of America. But no, zero, not a line of Monroe’s poetry sings. I’m hard on the man out of loyalty to my people, especially my dead-broke dead grandfather who died before I had a chance to know him much, but even now I can’t force myself to quote even one line, not even to make fun of it, which would be too easy—though I’ve got all three of Monroe Sarkansky’s books right here with me. Gardenias and Salamanders. The Golden Afternoon. A Mother’s Love and Other Poems. It is telling, isn’t it, that after all their losses, my grandfather, and after his death my grandmother, held on to the books. The fake name on these spines is the only thing left of his fake fortune.
I can’t help wondering about those poetry lessons. For six months, Monroe spent Thursday afternoons in Delmore Schwartz’s apartment on Charles Stree
t in the West Village. Most of Schwartz’s friends had begun to distance themselves. (They’d wait until he was dead to write about him. Who from that time, from his set, didn’t take a crack at Delmore Schwartz after they found him alone, crazy, and very dead in a Times Square hotel in 1966? His fall into madness was just too delicious.) So, it’s possible that a dapper wannabe in an exquisitely tailored suit and a fedora was harmless-enough company for forty-five minutes. And at $150 per session, cash, it beat what most magazines paid for poems. Schwartz must have known the man was beyond hope. You might make a poet out of someone who’s never written a poem. But give a fraud of an investment banker eyes to see? Even so, it stands to reason that the two of them, the poet and the eager student, must have settled into their afternoons together. Delmore Schwartz might have sat in a chair and recited a few lines as Monroe stood by hoping that mere proximity to poetry might do the trick.
Schwartz may have even told Monroe one of his darlings.
You know, don’t you, that Wallace Stevens was a lousy lawyer? They only kept him around the insurance company because he was such a magnificent poet!
When Schwartz laughed, he hooted.
And maybe after discoursing for a while, Schwartz would doze off, and Monroe would stand there and wait.
A half hour later, Schwartz opens his eyes and says, “You’re still here? Did you pay me?”
“We still have eight minutes left on the lesson.”
“By whose authority? The New York Stock Exchange?”
And I also wonder if there came a moment when Schwartz, more paranoid by the day but still, deep down, the street-smart kid from Brooklyn, let his obedient pupil know that he saw through it, the elegant suit, the fedora, the accent—
Schwartz makes a paper airplane out of one of Monroe’s verses and launches it out the window. “What kind of kike uses the word ‘bough’ for ‘branch’?”
“‘Branch’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘Frau,’” Monroe says.
Schwartz smiles. You can’t argue with that. And it’s been days (weeks?) since he’s smiled. Not since he wrote a ditty commemorating the death of Robert Frost, that frosty-haired toad.
“Anatole tells me you’ve got a loony wife home in Holyoke,” Schwartz says.
“Fall River.”
“Ah, our dead mill towns are romantic, aren’t they?”
“They are?” Monroe says. “I never—”
Schwartz probes a nostril with his finger. “So, this wife moldering away? Now there’s a subject we can work with. How about a few lines about Miss Havisham? How many poems can one man write about mist?”
Maybe the pupil answered. Maybe he didn’t. Probably he was just flattered that Schwartz took any interest in him at all. Still, he might have said, One man can write innumerable poems about mist, Professor Schwartz.
And it may have been Broyard (or Saul Bellow or Dwight Macdonald or Alfred Kazin) who recounts it, but eventually Schwartz tossed Monroe out on his ear. Farewell, my millionaire, I got vendettas to dream up, up, up.
If Monroe wasn’t officially family, his wife was even less so. After all those losses, financial and otherwise—the amount of the loss always grew in the telling, year after year—who in the family wanted to be reminded of Mort Sarkansky or whatever the hell his name was? Or his wife? But even back in its brief peak, Jewish Fall River was still a postage stamp. A few blocks in the Flint. A few German Jews and upstarts scattered across the Highlands. In an ancient cabinet at the Temple Beth El office (a kind of card catalog of the dead) I found her name: Eleanor (Ellie). Maiden name: Weissman. Her father was a partner in a large Fall River hat factory, Marshall Hat, the company that made, among other headwear, Monroe’s fedoras.
My mother and I were in the kitchen. This was about a decade ago now. My mother, keeper of our family secrets. All information is on a need-to-know basis, and the basis is you don’t need to know.
“Why’d they sock her away?” I asked.
“Sock who?”
“Monroe’s wife.”
“Monroe?”
“Mort!”
“Oh, Mort. You know your father and I once stayed at his pied-à-terre in St. Thomas.”
“Nassau.”
“Was it in Nassau? Your father thought he died and went to heaven. I should have left him there. The place came with a butler. I wish I could remember his name. Marcel? I’d step out of the pool, and this beautiful man would be standing there with a robe, the softest—”
“But what about her?”
“Let the dead bury their dead, isn’t that what people say?”
“Not Jews,” I said.
My stepfather, Herb, called from the next room, where he was watching the Blackhawks on mute. “He’s right,” Herb said. “Jews don’t say let the dead bury their dead. We say, ‘Call Piser’s and let’s get this over with as soon as possible.’”
“Why’d they put her away?” I said.
My mother took a sip of her martini and shrugged. Maybe she was calculating the statute of limitations on material intelligence concerning nonfamily members and figured what the hell. How many people alive even remember these people existed?
“Mort had a stroke.”
“What? What about the pearl-handled pistol? What about Sammy Davis?”
“Sammy Davis was there, I think; so was Carol Channing. Mort and Carol Channing may have had a thing. But it was a stroke. My father made that up about the gun.”
“Why?”
“Poetic justice?” my mother said, coughing and laughing at the same time, remembering her father, a melancholic who spent much of his life laughing because, as he said, what other choice has a man got? Laugh or call it quits.
“Mom.”
“You know my father never liked Mort. He’d have forgiven him the money. What he couldn’t stomach was anybody who thought they were superior. And Mort always had to be the cock of the walk. So my father did him in with a pearl-handled pistol, so what? This is all water under a bridge that doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“I’m just asking—”
My mother sipped her martini. She ran her tongue across her teeth to make it go down slower.
“My God, it was so long ago. I remember she’d never quite look at you. Like she always found a spot on your ear to look at. Pretty, one of those oval faces. Always wore her hair short. And very bright. She spoke several languages, which for a Fall River girl was quite—”
“Mom.”
“They must have sent her to a boarding school. For a while, Marshall Hat was one of the largest manufacturers of hats in the country.”
“Mom.”
“She and Mort had a few good years together. They’d come around to the family. Then the business began to take off, and Mort started to stay in New York for long stretches. After a while, he stopped coming home at all. With Mort gone most of the time, we stopped seeing her. She just sort of vanished, though she only lived over on Locust Street. We’d see her through the windows. And people started to say she was a little cuckoo, sure, but harmless. Then, almost out of nowhere, came the baby. And she refused any help. Any help at all. Of course, this alarmed all the aunties. Refuse help with the baby? Raise it herself? And then—darling, what’s the score?”
“Predators up by one,” Herb said.
“Predators?” she said.
“And then?” I said.
“Expansion team,” Herb said. “Nashville.”
My mother doodled on the telephone memo pad. “Nashville has a hockey team?”
“And then?” I said.
“She lit the crib on fire,” my mother said.
“Huh?”
“It was the sixties,” my mother said. “All kinds of wild things were happening. Setting a bed on fire was nothing. Anyway, the boy wasn’t hurt. She dropped her cigarette by accident, that’s what I’ve always believed. I never thought she was crazy.”
“And then?”
“They sent her to Menninger’s.” My mother called to my stepfather.
“Herb, where’s Menninger’s? Nebraska?”
“Kansas,” Herb said. “Topeka.”
“Kansas, that’s right—”
“Why?” I said.
“Because she was crazy, she tried to burn the house—”
“But you just said she wasn’t.”
“Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t.”
“And the boy?” I said. “What happened—”
“He went to Kansas, too. They had some sort of school for the children of patients. You know, Menninger’s was the place when you lost your mind. They sent Gene Tierney there. There must have been some money left over from the hat factory. Either that or Mort had managed to squirrel some money away for her that the creditors couldn’t attach. That’s what my father always thought. Not that he begrudged it, he just assumed that Mort had outfoxed—outsquirreled? Can we talk about something else? How’s your divorce going?”
“Who’s Gene Tierney?” I said.
“He wants to know who’s Gene Tierney?” Herb said.
“My God, Gene Tierney’s cheekbones,” my mother said.
“And then?” I said. “She couldn’t have stayed in Kansas forever.”